[danthe]

What is the extent of their automation? Do they really do accrual accounting? It seems their customer base is companies that only accept payments online (mostly through Stripe) and they do cash basis accounting. Mind if I ping you for more questions on your experience with them?

[wdaher]

Hi there! Pilot CEO here. We do accrual bookkeeping by default but we can do cash-basis bookkeeping too, if you require it.

By and large our requirements are around the use of electronic systems to capture data (so, if you have a stack of paper invoices today and you're opposed to using a system like bill.com or similar, it's not going to be a great fit.)

[danthe]

Is reconciliation done also automatically or is there a person checking every bank transaction and confirming the reconciliation? Afaik quickbooks doesn't offer a reconciliation API, but also I would be skeptical about not having a human confirm every transaction reconciled.

[wdaher]

We do the reconciliation—and you're exactly right that QBO doesn't have a reconciliation API, so we have to do it outside of QuickBooks in our own system.

(But yes, we've found that if you don't do this reconciliation, the bank feed will just silently drop transactions, etc.)

[danthe]

Can you clarify a bit more when you say you reconcile "outside of QBO"? Does this mean you're keeping track of reconciled items in a separate system and not in QBO? In QBO if an invoice payment is reconciled I can see which bank transaction it has been associated with; will this be the case with Pilot?

[wdaher]

Hi! Not doing this to be evasive but because I think we can probably have a higher-bandwidth chat about the exact specifics of it by phone, if you're up for it.

Can I encourage you to drop me a note at [e-mail] or we can schedule some time together here?: https://calendly.com/pilot-waseem/overview

[adam_gyroscope]

Please do ping me! My company was pretty starightforward, but I know they handle some fairly complex companies.

[danthe]

Hey, thanks for this. What's the best way to contact you?

[danthe]

For example if I get a pdf bill in my inbox for some saas subscription, how does the pdf make it into QuickBooks? @wdaher is implying you need to be using bill.com, so I'm concluding that you need to get the bill into bill.com.

Another case is do they do expense accruals? E.g. i don't get my utilities bill until middle of the month. The right way to account for that is to accrue the expense for the previous month and reverse the journal entry on the 1st of the following month. How does Pilot automate expense accruals cases (same question for revenue)?

[wdaher]

Yes, generally you have to use something like a bill.com or routable (https://routable.com/) if you want to track an AP flow starting with the bill in that way.

(There's a more premium version of Pilot Plus where you basically just forward the bill to bill.com and we'll code it and submit it for approval for you, etc.)

As for expense and revenue accruals, you and we have to mutually agree on a mechanism for you to communicate that information to us. Exactly what that mechanism is will depend on the details of the revenue or expense accrual, but sometimes this is as simple as "You tell us you have a recurring expense of X amount, so you need to accrue y% of it every month", sometimes it's just you report "I'd like to accrue X", etc.